Disorder Quotes - Page 23

• Even if the absence of government really did mean anarchy in a negative, disorderly sense - which is far from being the case - even then, no anarchical disorder could be worse than the position to which government has led humanity.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Mean, Government, Humanity

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• Exorcists always need to distinguish demonic possessions from mental or psychiatric disorders, and they use three symptoms to identify people as possessed. First, those people have the ability to see hidden sacred objects, which they always want removed. Second, they have an extraordinary physical strength. And third, they show an aversion to the sacred

  Gerard Verschuuren

  People, Evil, Three

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• Reaching for the stars, perfectionists may end up clutching air. They suffer from mood disorders, troubled relationships, and stress. They may even achieve less than others.

  David D. Burns

  Stars, Stress, Air

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• In times of disorder and stress, the fanatics play a prominent role; in times of peace, the critics. Both are shot after the revolution.

  Edmund Wilson

  Truth, Stress, Play

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• If a new result is to have any value, it must unite elements long since known, but till then scattered and seemingly foreign to each other, and suddenly introduce order where the appearance of disorder reigned.

  Wilfred Bion

  Order, Long, Connections

  Wilfred Ruprecht Bion (1977). “Seven Servants: Four Works”, Jason Aronson Incorporated

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• Chaos is not disorder. Chaos is the totality of existence. You could call it God. You could use the term, the Tao. I like chaos. It means more to us in English. Chaos is all things, wild and wonderful, connected perfectly by the life force.

  Frederick Lenz

  Mean, Science, Taoism

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• POTABLE, n. Suitable for drinking. Water is said to be potable; indeed, some declare it our natural beverage, although even they find it palatable only when suffering from the recurrent disorder known as thirst, for which it is a medicine. Upon nothing has so great and diligent ingenuity been brought to bear in all ages and in all countries, except the most uncivilized, as upon the invention of substitutes for water. To hold that this general aversion to that liquid has no basis in the preservative instinct of the race is to be unscientific-and without science we are as the snakes and toads.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Country, Drinking, Science

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2484, Delphi Classics

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• Reading is the unbelievably healthy way
  my attention deficit disorder medicates itself.
  Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to
  make contact with reality after a day of making things up.

  Nora Ephron

  Reading, Reality, Opposites

  Nora Ephron (2008). “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman”, p.84, Random House

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• Who am I? this or the other?
  Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
  Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
  and before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?
  Or is something within me still like a beaten army fleeing
  in disorder from a victory already achieved?
  Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
  Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Lonely, Hypocrite, Army

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2012). “The Cost of Discipleship”, p.20, Simon and Schuster

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• Life is not, nor ever has been, a straight line forward ... Life is characterized much more by exception and disorder than by total or perfect order.

  Richard Rohr

  Order, Perfect, Lines

  Richard Rohr (2011). “Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life”, p.54, John Wiley & Sons

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• Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation-who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him-but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope-qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.

  William Styron

  Writing, Past, Judging

  William Styron (2015). “My Generation: Collected Nonfiction”, p.417, Random House

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• I had a Tourette's period. And obsessive compulsive disorder. Things would get in my brain that I couldn't get out of my brain.

  Richard Ford

  Brain, Obsessive Compulsive, Tourettes

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• I came, I saw, I was confused.

  Breyten Breytenbach

  Confused, Saws

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• The principles of all genuine liberty, and of wise laws and administrations are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man therefore who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that book may be assessory to all the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer.

  Noah Webster

  Wise, Book, Men

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• If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.

  Pierre Bayle

  History, Weakness, Crime

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• Women with body image or eating disorders are not a special category; [they’re] just more extreme in their response to a culture that emphasizes thinness and impossible standards of appearance for women instead of individuality and health.

  Gloria Steinem

  Individuality, Special, Eating Disorder

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• The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.

  Nicole Krauss

  Memories, Data, Ideas

  Nicole Krauss (2003). “Man Walks Into a Room”, p.39, Anchor

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• Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you're labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S.

  Jon Ronson

  Childhood, Bipolar, Sometimes

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• Sometimes I feel the only way I can get a major publisher interested in mental illness is if I find a character who has bipolar disorder and is also a love-sick vampire attending an English school called Hogwarts. But I'm not giving up.

  Pete Earley

  Giving Up, Character, School

  "What's Driving Pete Earley Crazy". Interview with Lizzie Simon, www.psychologytoday.com. March 18, 2010.

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• It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head.

  Tony Judt

  Fall, Men, Healthy

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• Foresight is good when it is subject to the latter, but it becomes excessive when we are in a hurry to avoid something we fear. We rely more on our own efforts than on those of his Providence, and we think we are doing a great deal by anticipating His orders by our own disorder, which causes us to rely on human prudence rather than on his Word.

  Vincent de Paul

  Faith, Thinking, Order

  Saint Vincent de Paul, Pierre Coste (1993). “Correspondence, Conferences, Documents: Apr. 1650-July 1653”, New City Pr

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• And we all get mired in the bullshit, the personality quirks, the personality disorders (ours and everyone else's), the jealousy, the disappointment, the blocks, the financial struggle, our egos, I do it too, I do it too, but if you can't remember it is all about the work and nothing else then I can't help you and you can't help yourself and you will lose. I promise you. You will lose.

  Jami Attenberg

  Disappointment, Block, Struggle

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• Excesses accomplish nothing. Disorder immediately defeats itself.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Accomplish Nothing, Luxury, Excess

  Woodrow Wilson, Albert Fried (1965). “A Day of Dedication”, New York : Macmillan [1965]

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• I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality; I am also an abstainer and a nonsmoker, and these bottles in Haller's room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder.

  Hermann Hesse

  Love, Men, Class

  Hermann Hesse (1983). “Steppenwolf”, Bantam

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• Forty years ago, after many years of successful use of thyroid therapy, leading gynecologists in this country and elsewhere were reporting thyroid had cured more menstrual disorders than all other medications combined. Unfortunately, that lesson seems to have been largely lost.

  Broda Otto Barnes

  Country, Successful, Years

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